Unveiling a new Adobe Developer Connection

Today, if you’re a frequent visitor to the Adobe Developer Connection (ADC), you may be noticing some major changes to our site.

Here’s what’s going on: We’ve just launched a new design with the goal of improving our site, making it easier for you to find the content you need. On top of that, the new ADC is also running on a new content management system, powered by Day Software, which is improving our ability to deliver our technical content and keep it up to date.

Content, community, and growth

Almost ten years ago, a small team of editors launched the first ADC. We knew what we wanted to do: To provide a great place for people to find information that could make them successful with their web design and development projects.

At first, our goal was simple: Get as much content out into the world as possible to help our developers. We partnered with our developer community to create tutorials and technical articles—those experts were the builders of the Adobe Developer Connection. The ADC quickly became a platform for providing this information as well as a center for spotlighting experts in our developer community.

However, as the ADC has matured, we ran into an issue many of you have probably experienced: We had more content than we could manage. We lacked tools for evaluating, updating, and archiving a large repository of information, and this issue began to affect our users.

Your feedback addressed

As the ADC grew, we on the ADC team worked to address user feedback by adding new features in an effort to modernize parts of the site. While we made some improvements and got positive responses, we knew that many of these changes were merely on the surface. It was time for a complete, top-to-bottom redesign.

We based our strategies for the current ADC redesign on feedback that you had been providing us through focus groups and surveys. Some of that feedback prompted us to make changes in the design and architecture of the site, and some of it pointed us toward making changes in how we manage the content itself.

Here are a few things you told us--and how your input influenced the ADC redesign.

The Day CMS

To power the new site, we’re using Day Software’s CQ5 as our content management system. Previously, the ADC was managed simply through a static HTML file structure. While this provided us maximum flexibility and freedom to make changes at will, it was not sustainable or scalable for a site the size of the ADC. We simply became over-burdened with managing the details of change requests and workflows.

With Day, we’ve been able to design and build reusable custom components to our own site specifications, and to assemble them into consistent templates that map to our page types. We are able to store supporting assets centrally, while maintaining the ability to publish changes quickly and easily. We can kick off editorial and production workflows without writing up complicated lists of instructions for adding and removing content. With this initial launch, I believe we are only scratching the surface of what the Day system can do, but we’re seeing gigantic gains already for our team and for the ADC, and hope to more fully utilize its capabilities in future revs of the site.

Try it out

As you try out the new site, you’ll notice some changes. Here are some of the new features that we want you to try out:

New home page navigation

We moved from a very long list of products to a simpler grouping of products for the main product families the ADC covers: Flash Platform, Creative Suite, and Enterprise products.

ADC Featured stories

This new page provides a view for those of you who come back to that ADC frequently so that you can check out what’s new across the entire site.

Modular design and organization

We’re surfacing more content within the body of the page, and offering you an option dive deeper using the “More” links, as opposed to a separate navigational list.

Feeds of community-generated content

Many pages are pulling in content from other areas such as forums, blogs, and Adobe Cookbooks, providing you with a broader base of content from which to find answers and inspiration.

So check out the new site, and let us know what you think by sending us some quick feedback. We do know that not everything will be perfect—as much as we would like it to be. As web developers and designers, you’re familiar with the constant need for an influx of new ideas, user observation, and data for continued development.

We really want to know how you like the new templates, the navigational structure, and how you’re finding content. We have some additional features to be launched very soon, so it’s important that we get your feedback now so we can work changes into subsequent releases. We hope that you enjoy this new site, and use it to learn and get inspired as you are using Adobe technologies.